为什么《阿凡达》能成票房冠军?

Barely a month into its theatrical run, 'Avatar' set a record for world-wide ticket sales, topping $1.85 billion. That is a reflection of its wide popularity, and also a reminder of the quirky way that Hollywood crowns champions.

In recent decades, the agreed-upon benchmark for movie dominance has been box-office revenue, unadjusted for inflation. That means 'Avatar,' like the previous all-time leader, 1997's 'Titanic,' and prior box-office kings benefited in part from favorable comparisons. Since tallies of ticket sales aren't adjusted for inflation, rising ticket prices have helped pave the way for a number of more-recent films, including 'The Dark Knight' and 'Transformers,' to land near the top of box-office rankings.

Of the top 25 grossing films of all time on Hollywood.com's U.S. box-office ranking, 18 were released in the past decade. Adjust the totals for higher admission prices mainly due to inflation, and 'Avatar' would be the only one of those 18 to make the list -- at No. 24, as of Thursday. The film has grossed $564.5 million in the U.S. and Canada so far, putting it $36.3 million shy of 'Titanic's' U.S. record. And 'Avatar' is still drawing big crowds in theaters.

How media measure their audience varies widely, and each industry's standard plays a big role in determining how often headline-grabbing records are set. Videogame and book publishers tout units sold, which removes rising prices from the equation but still can create new chart toppers because of population growth.

Broadway theaters, like movie studios, don't adjust for inflation. The all-time theatrical box-office king is 'Phantom of the Opera,' according to BroadwayWorld.com, a theater-news Web site. 'Wicked,' however, ranks third at the box office, helped by today's more expensive ticket prices; the musical sold fewer seats than hits with lower box-office revenue such as 'Cats' and 'Miss Saigon.'

Television corrects for population changes when crowning new kings, defining ratings as the percentage of potential viewers who are tuning in. Being the No. 1 hit today can overstate a network television show's cultural impact, however, since today's most-watched programs draw a smaller audience share than hit shows did a generation ago.

Like television, older box-office hits drew on far smaller potential audiences than today's movies. Since it first opened, 'Gone With the Wind' has sold more than three times as many tickets as 'Avatar' has so far, even though it was first released at a time when the U.S. population was less than half what it is today. In addition to today's higher ticket prices, theater owners typically tack on $3 for 'Avatar's' 3-D viewings. 'Avatar' was produced by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

Some Hollywood veterans would prefer a tally of admissions over the current standard of dollars. 'I always felt it was much classier to report on how many admissions there were for a film than on how much money a film made,' says Marcie Polier Swartz, founder of EDI, a company that began counting box-office totals for the studios in 1976. 'But in America, it was the big dollar figures that made headlines, and nobody would be persuaded.'

Box-office figures do have one major advantage: They make historical comparisons simpler. Sales totals are all that is available for older films. Even finding these requires some box-office archaeology, as the record keepers call it.

The difficulty of accounting for changes over time would make creating a true apples-to-apples comparison 'a nightmare,' says Steven Ginsberg, who helped launch Variety's box-office reporting and is now a screenwriter and writing teacher. It is difficult to make a truly fair comparison, he notes, when movies in the era of 'Gone With the Wind' didn't have to compete with television and videogames.